THE PLAN WAS for Richard and Jamie to meet their mother at J.G. Melon on 74th and Third, and over a hamburger she would tell them about her visit with Dad and they could discuss what they should do next. That was the plan. But Mom was twenty-five minutes late, thirty if going by the wedge of watermelon clock over the bar, and now the lunch crowd teemed and tables garnered a waiting list, the space between self and food growing longer by the minute. The brothers sat in the corner, the television overhead a thought balloon via ESPN. They were the missed free throw, the shot on post, the lipped putt. When they first arrived the host told them they could have their pick of table once their party was complete. How that word charmed them. “We are incomplete,” from Richard, “You incomplete me,” from Jamie, as they settled into the bar and ordered a club soda and a beer. It seemed a more innocent time back then, the good old days of a quarter-past-twelve. Their bartender was likely Bobby “Big Baby” Frizz, famous for his cantilevering stomach, but Richard and Jamie had no idea of his name. They knew Melon’s, though. We all did. I can still see it on the northeast corner, its exterior painted green with a slice of red neon that seemed forever reflected in rainwater. Most of our childhood haunts had long disappeared, but Melon’s still beckoned like a mirage miraculously real.
“It’s like this place is preserved in amber,” Jamie was saying.
Richard nodded.
“Same menu, same décor, prices certainly different, but essentially we could be those preppy kids over there. Nothing would be anachronistic. Same cash register even. It’s timeless for as long as I’ve known time.”
Richard stopped nodding. “You stoned?”
“Perhaps.”
“And now you’re getting drunk?”
“Drunk? Two beers doth not a drunk make.”
“That’s your fifth refill, Shakespeare.”
“No way.”
“Yep.”
“In my defense it’s a small glass.” Jamie squinted and went all shaggy, the dimple on his cheek like a registered trademark. Fucking Richard, he thought, fuck Richard but fucking Richard, always determined to define himself in opposition to the world, like a linebacker, while Jamie was the running back slipping through the seams. But Jamie should be kinder. After all, his brother was showing impressive patience, though pity the ripped cocktail napkin and the mangled red straw. And Jamie himself no longer breezed through openings but stumbled and bruised easily. This morning he had gotten another call from Sylvia, quickly ignored and deleted, which made a total of three beyond-the-dead dials. And yesterday emails from old friends started to thread his mailbox with subject lines like Have you seen this? or Sylvia Freaking Weston! or Oh my God! All of them contained links to videos on various websites. Obviously something had happened; obviously someone at RazorRam, maybe Ram Barrett himself, had posted 12:01 P.M. online and the video had metastasized. Goddamn Ram. Goddamn me. Eyes closed, Jamie could hear Sylvia’s footsteps approaching. How are you? Scared shitless, thank you very much. His solution was simple: no more computer, no more phone. He embraced his own brand of Cartesian logic—I do not answer, therefore I do not exist. The pot helped as well. “I’m starving,” he told Richard.
“Bet you are.”
“Because it’s lunchtime.” Then Jamie added, “Asshole.”
“Right.”
“I’m not that stoned.”
“Whatever.”
“Seriously.”
Richard turned toward the door, where a couple breezed in like a commercial for healthy promiscuity, the man and woman undaunted by the crowd or the thirty-minute wait or the man glaring from the vicinity of the bar. “This is getting ridiculous,” Richard said.
“Getting? Gotten,” Jamie said.
“Why does she have a cellphone if she never answers?”
“She’s like God that way.”
Richard considered his brother. “Good one,” he finally said.
“I try.”
“Sounds like something Dad would’ve written.”
Jamie placed his hand over his chest. “Ouch.”
“Sorry, low blow. Or high blow.”
“Momma says ‘Blow me,’ ” Jamie said, which was an old joke between them.
Richard smiled. “You remember The Runaway Bunny? Of course you don’t, you don’t have kids, but it’s a great little book, for like small kids, two-year-olds, three-year-olds. It’s about this bunny, duh, who wants to run away, or who threatens to run away, is actually asking his mother a totally different question, the way kids do, asking a far more abstract question, which sometimes you hear and sometimes you don’t, or you don’t hear until days later and you’re like damn, that’s what he was asking. Anyway, it’s a great book, with amazing illustrations, truly beautiful, and maybe the best ending in the world. It was Emmett’s favorite, read it to him a thousand times. Chloe preferred Goodnight Moon. There’s even a reference in Goodnight Moon to The Runaway Bunny and vice versa. I mean, it’s all kind of genius.” Richard paused. “Why the hell am I talking about this?”
“I have no idea, man,” Jamie said.
“There was a point.”
“Something about Dad?”
“No.”
“Something about a rabbit you once knew who ran away?”
“Ha-ha,” Richard parried. He tried to keep himself within well-defined boundaries instead of letting his embarrassment poke through, you sentimental ass, talking about The Runaway Bunny like it’s some masterpiece of literature. But there was a point, a humorous point, he swore. After a sniffy breath, Richard abandoned the thought. “I really need to go for a long run. I hate using the elliptical.”
“Can I download this book?” Jamie asked.
“Enough.”
“I’m being serious. It sounds interesting.”
“Fuck off.”
“I swear, this is me serious. At least tell me how it ends.”
“The mother shuts the kid up with a carrot, okay, asshole.” Richard checked his watch against the watermelon. “I can’t wait much longer. I’ve got things to do.”
“What do you have to do?”
“I have a meeting.”
“There must be a meeting every five minutes in this city.”
“No, not that kind of meeting,” Richard said, yawning just to change expression. It was almost funny, this misunderstanding, if Richard could have given his brother the benefit of his own self-crushing doubt. Fucking Jamie. Stoned and drunk and deluded into thinking this was rascally and lovable. A long time ago that pleased-with-itself grin inspired the physics of a well-tossed apple, a helluva shot from Richard that slammed into Jamie’s cheek and dented the bone into an adorable dimple. Typical, with his luck. But Richard tried to push aside old trajectories. Because it was funny, this misunderstanding, funnier still because Richard had gone to a meeting meeting earlier this morning, in a church basement on Lexington and 76th. The Manhattan brethren seemed so professional, so clean and well dressed, except for a few scrubbers in the back who appeared recently unrolled from a rug, kidnapped from somewhere south of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God. Richard ended up talking, as planned. He told those gathered about being back in New York after a long absence and how the last time he was here he was squatting in Central Park, finding a perch in an old elm that had his boyhood initials carved in the trunk. The cops shooed him away every so often, but he would circle back and climb higher and of course get higher—a nice laugh from the group—and he would climb higher still and get higher still until he found himself stuck near the top. “I was frozen,” he said. “Because as we all know going up is a lot easier than coming down.” A bit on the nose that. He told them how he pictured a hook and ladder screaming to the rescue, a crowd applauding as the fireman carried down this stranded crackhead kitty—no laugh here. But instead he unstuck himself when everything was smoked, practically flung his body from branch to branch and once on the ground again searched the surrounding leaves for any dropped crumbs. It was a decent story, if too well practiced from meetings in L.A., and maybe too L.A., too glib and too cute, too corny, desperate to be loved, sentimental—holy Christ, so fucking sentimental, Richard thought, The Runaway Bunny still in his head. For all his intense meaning, he was half-assed. Richard tossed the straw onto the bar. No, Jamie, this afternoon he had a different kind of meeting. “It’s a business thing,” he said, watching the straw go through its plastic death throes.
“I thought AA was your business?”
“My other business, movie business, screenplay stuff.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Humility flitted but Richard swatted. “I’m meeting with Eric Harke.”
“Like the actor Eric Harke?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Really? That’s so fucking cool.”
Richard went into immediate downplay mode. “We’ll see.”
“He did that young Albert Einstein thing, right?”
“You’re thinking Thomas Edison.”
“Right, right, right, as like a superhero.”
“A super inventor,” Richard corrected.
“Right, with those electromagnetic thingamajigs.”
“That was the young Tesla.”
“Right. And they lived in a giant zeppelin. What was that movie called?”
Richard picked the straw up again. “The Steampunks.”
“Very cool, very cool.” A waggle of the mug and Big Baby poured a fresh one for Jamie, who took a sip, in hindsight a gulp. He was happy for his brother, hence the impressed nodding, a tight rhythmic loop, like his nose was keeping a small ball in the air, an appreciation of Richard’s journey from miserable teen to terrible addict to successful husband and father and now what? screenwriter, all on his own terms, really impressive stuff, this nodding tried to convey, though the nodding also acknowledged all the years when Jamie depended on Richard’s foundering since it made him shine in comparison, the healthy and presentable son, the charmer feeding his mother casual bits of brotherly criticism, like she was turf won or lost on a daily basis, like one of those hills in one of those wars in one of those countries. Jamie let the ball drop onto his lap. “What’s the screenplay about?” he asked.
“It’s a satire about the movie business.”
“Sounds cool.”
“About an old actor, sort of like Brando at his lowest.”
“Okay.”
“And he’s starring in this ridiculous lowbrow comedy.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not that I really know the movie business, except what I see in the movies.”
“I’m sure it’s great.”
“It’ll probably never happen.”
“You’re meeting with Eric Harke. That’s huge.”
A pause between brothers. Silence seemed written into the wood of the bar, which both of them traced with their eyes. Richard and Jamie hadn’t talked much over the last twenty years. Mom was the usual intermediary, the wall through which they tapped, dependent on her dividing presence to keep them connected. Without her, the prisoners might riot before fleeing. But right now she was forty minutes late.
Richard thumped the bar. “Where the hell is she?”
Jamie suggested they just order some food.
“What could they be talking about?”
“I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”
“You don’t think they’re rekindling the old flame.”
“No,” Jamie said, “she’s just feeling sorry for him. What are Candy and the kids up to?”
“I think the Statue of Liberty.”
“Can’t say I’ve ever been.”
“Me neither.”
“They having a good time?”
“And Candy?”
“Sure.”
“And how about you?”
“Despite Dad’s behavior?”
“Yes, despite that hiccup. How’s it been, being back?”
Richard thought for a moment. “I keep on expecting to run into people, you know, like people I’ve wronged one way or another. Or worse than wronged. I’m walking around with an apology speech running in my head, what with the way I left, you know, without a word to friends. Like if I see Ryan Swift—you remember Ryan?”
“Of course.”
“I was kind of awful to him,” Richard said.
“I thought that was one of the twelve steps. Amends, right?”
“He’s one I missed.”
“He lives in Denver anyway.”
“Really?”
“Yep. Divorced. Has three kids.”
“Wow.” Richard propped his chin on top of clasped hands. A hundred old friends could have walked through that door—I could have walked through that door and Sal the host would have seated me ahead of everyone else, and Margie, who had worked there forever, would have put in my order without asking—bacon burger medium, cottage fries, Diet Coke—or maybe the Irish girl, Sheila, or even better the newcomer Kivi with those big glistening teeth like a wet T-shirt—but only strangers swung through. A few days in the city and Richard had bumped into just one old friend, Roger Braxton, who was hardly a friend, practically a sworn enemy since the second grade—Roger the crybaby snob, the weenie rich boy, the self-professed king of the club scene, there he was walking down Madison in his size-stout suit and balding pate that resembled the hair around an asshole, walking right toward Richard, who recognized this nesting doll of awful Braxton men, Richard letting this idiot pass with good riddance, but a few steps later he let go with “Roger? Roger Braxton?” and Roger turned around and seemed baffled until Richard identified himself, and they chatted for a minute, Roger dropping a few kind words into Richard’s outstretched hand. Two blocks later Richard was back to hating the prick. Goddamn New York. Goddamn me. “I did run into Roger Braxton,” he told Jamie.
“Oh Jesus.”
“I was almost happy to see him.”
“You used to beat the crap out of him,” Jamie said.
“I did?”
“All sanctioned school violence but you made a point of it.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“You don’t remember breaking his leg?”
“Not really.”
“He was the catcher and you barreled into him.”
“Maybe I remember him blocking the plate.”
“I can still hear the way he screamed.”
“Oh shit.”
“Now you remember.” Jamie started to laugh, half-fake, half-real.
“He did seem sort of jumpy when I said hello.”
“I bet he was.”
Now Richard started to laugh, a third fake.
“Poor guy must have been petrified.”
“I’m an idiot.”
“He probably thought you were going to slide-tackle him.”
The laughter continued to grow in percentages until its genuine form took over, the brothers giddy from waiting and relieved to find themselves in good company, perhaps even driving the laughter forward and riding its smooth wake.
“I almost hugged him,” Richard said.
“He would’ve shat his pants.”
Richard pulled a cellphone from his pocket.
“Is it Mom?” asked Jamie.
“No. This is Emmett’s phone.” On the touchscreen sweet Emma sported a fish face, her lips touching toward the infinite. She always called him Mr. Dyer no matter how many times he insisted on Richard. Brown eyes, brown hair, brown sunbaked complexion, so cute, so young. So persistent. This must have been her tenth call.
“Why do you have Emmett’s phone?”
“Not really sure. I need to give it back to him.”
“She’s cute.”
Richard turned the phone away from his brother. “She’s sixteen.”
“Even better.”
“Perv.”
“I’m just happy for Emmett.”
“You can’t believe how many phone calls and texts he gets.”
“I bet. He’s a good-looking kid.”
“I mean, who has that kind of time to keep in touch?”
“It’s all pseudo-connection, the device of the device.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Not sure,” Jamie said, finishing his beer.
“I think he’s done something lousy to this girl, and she’s upset with him, which is too bad because they’ve been friends a long time.”
“You ever answer any of the calls?”
“Of course not.”
“I would,” Jamie said in a wicked tone.
Did Emma know that Emmett was in New York? Or had he just disappeared on her? Emma and Emmett. & Emmett. Already he seemed more of a man than a son, though Richard could still see the boy, even the baby, within those accumulated days. Like the universe, we are at our youngest and our oldest at the farthest edge. “He’s reading Ampersand,” Richard told Jamie.
“Well, it is a classic.”
“I kind of hate that he’s reading it.”
“Why?”
“It’s like what the hell have I done in comparison?”
“You’re meeting with Eric Harke.”
Richard made an uncertain sound, a sort of dubious groan.
“You’ve certainly crushed Dad in the fatherhood department,” Jamie said.
“That’s like getting a trophy for showing up.”
“But hell, you showed up.”
“Doesn’t seem like much of a success to me.”
“What, success like Dad’s?”
“Nobody cares what kind of father he was.”
“Except for his kids,” Jamie said. “Ergo nobody really cares about him. When A. N. Dyer dies, he’s dead. A thousand, a million people loving his books won’t change that fact. They’ll just read his obituary and move on to sports.”
“You never had that big a problem with him,” Richard said.
“Not like you.”
“You just did your thing.”
“What the hell was my thing?” Jamie asked. “Whatever it was, it seems so fucked up, what I did, what I do, did did, do do—I swear I’m not that stoned, but whatever the doing or the didding, it was all about other people’s truth, that’s what I wanted to capture. I hate that word. Capture. I don’t trust anyone who captures anything except escaped prisoners. As far as I can tell I mistook misery for truth and spent a dozen years making the World’s Most Horrific Home Video with me as the smiling host, stoned most of the time, weirdly suicidal but in the laziest, most passive-fantastic way, like I could die the good heroic death without doing anything good or heroic. Dirty little secret, half my time, probably more, was spent in hotels or bars or resorts decompressing. Hence my financial situation, which any reasonable person would be pleased about but is certainly not near what it was. I think I had an idea of what I was doing, back when I started, but I seriously can’t remember.”
“Seems important to me,” Richard said.
“It was all self-serving.”
“What isn’t self-serving?”
“Somebody dying, to start things off.”
“But you were there for them.”
“Maybe the camera was but not me. I was too busy watching myself watch these things, and the whole time I swear I felt nothing. I tried, but I felt nothing. Maybe that’s what Dad gave me. That ability, or inability, to see the truth outside my own head. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just me. But it drove me to scarier places, hoping I might see something that would finally prove that I was real and not some clever machine. It was like my own fucked-up Turing test. Even hearing me talk”—Jamie spun his finger like a wheel—“it’s like, it’s like hearing me talk. I am my own worst simile.”
Richard thought about touching his brother’s back but the engineering seemed difficult.
“I might as well have been smoking crack with you, no offense.”
“None taken,” Richard said. “But I see you more as the heroin type.”
“I always did prefer my opiates.” Jamie paused. “Myopiates.”
“The crackhead and the junkie,” Richard said. “We could solve crimes.”
“Our own forgotten crimes.”
“You do the drawing, I do the writing.”
“I’m thinking stick figures,” Jamie said.
“Yeah, but the world around them is like—”
“Vivid.”
“Yeah, vivid,” Richard agreed.
There was another head-lowering silence but this time the bar held a different grain, like the wood was a door and on the other side Richard and Jamie were boys again and free of the complications that were inconceivable at that age, their father perfectly fine, their mother just right, the brothers running around their homemade world and if they came within a few feet of each other shoulders would bump and they would fall into a grapple, like magnets always aware of the tug. When does that change? And why? Richard and Jamie sat at the bar and waited, and while the days of easy camaraderie were gone, they were for a moment content with the distance.
Five minutes later their mother showed up.
She strained against the crowd as if a train had just rolled in and she was the waving handkerchief. Richard and Jamie remained unmoved in the corner, letting her push forward, past the phone-booth-size kitchen and into the back room jammed with tables. They stayed brothers a bit longer, eyes mocking Mom, clueless Mom, fifty minutes late and with her desperate-to-be-young haircut and her almost annoying competence and hard-to-get-a-handle-on jumble of pride and shame, like she was constantly grading herself, though she did look good, their mom, the calm water in which the men in her life could admire themselves, never sick a day and probably the same weight as when she was twenty, a decent mom, better than most. Richard and Jamie played the same game without a word about the rules until their mother spun back and spotted them. She seemed caught between emotions. And the brothers straightened, reshaped as sons.
“Sorry I’m so late,” she said, “but he didn’t want me to leave.”
“No problem,” from Jamie.
Richard went to the host and told him their party was finally complete, the host consulting a slip of paper with all the focus of impossible math. Richard was ready to hate New York all over again, certain they would have to wait for—“Okay,” the host said, “your table’s ready.”
“Really?”
“You used to come here, right, like years ago?”
“Yeah, yeah. Melon’s was my favorite.”
“I thought I recognized you. And your brother. Then your mother came in.”
A sudden surge of unexpected belonging lifted Richard.
“Your father still writing?”
Even that didn’t spoil the fine feeling. “Working on something, I think.”
“Great.” The host glanced into the back room. “Take the corner table.”
The act of sitting down at Melon’s involved a series of scoots from the people sitting nearby, the tables and chairs like the internal mechanism of a clock. Their spot was famous in a way: Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep had argued here in Kramer vs. Kramer. On the wall a small photo commemorated the scene, of Ted pointing his finger at Joanna seconds before he flings that wineglass against the wall. But in this scene Richard and Jamie patiently listen as their mother tells them about her visit, about this boy who opened the front door, shirtless in a pinstripe suit, funny and sensitive and maybe even a touch bold, like a fond memory, she says, and she knew, deep down, deeper than her bones, down in that, that, that small but sturdy hollow where your sense of self finds its rare, ineffable fit, down there she knew that Andrew was telling the truth, absolutely, that this boy was the boy she fell in love with, the boy she married, the boy who broke her heart, the boy who stood by her side, now impossibly old, as they watched the past bound up those stairs.
The brothers didn’t know how to respond.
Isabel brushed a few imaginary crumbs from the tablecloth.
“I know how it sounds,” she said, near tears. “Believe me, I know.”
I imagine the brothers sitting at the table as if sudden participants in a séance, spirits entering the room and creating another world right there in Melon’s where not only do you understand your parents as a combination of everyday delusions and misapprehensions, but now that you’re older, as old as they were when you first glimpsed their flaws and foibles, you understand something else, something more as your eyes wobble on the gingham blur of the tablecloth: that without this deception the crystal ball reveals nothing but your own misshapen eye. So I say bring up these worlds. Worlds upon worlds. Let me sit at that table by the window with my mother during one of our Friday lunches before heading to Long Island. Let me be ten years old again with a solid construct of home. Let Melon’s still stand instead of that artisanal Asian tea boutique now anchoring that corner. Let me glance toward that table where they filmed that sad movie about fatherhood and divorce and let me see the Dyer boys and their mother sitting quietly. Let me think about raising my hand hello.